So far his short career has been pretty mediocre, indistinguishable from countless other players who quietly fell short of the expectations set before them. There’s an obvious poignancy to this, I think. The consensus was that Manaea was going to be a pretty great, and throughout his entire life he’d probably been even better than that. Every time he stepped on a field, all eyes would have fallen upon him. He was the single-combat hero of whatever school, town or city he came from. A transcendent athlete with limitless horizons unfurling before him, he’d likely never encountered an appetite his talent could not slake.
And then, once in the Big Leagues, he just wasn’t very good anymore. Other players were better. The axis of his life had shifted, and now he was the kid who couldn’t get anybody out, rather than the unblemished golden boy.
He’d fallen.
He was no longer the best.
He’d become like the rest of us.
Because of my involvement in Fantasy Baseball, I had watched a lot of his starts over the years. There’s something really intimate in that, to be so closely focused on another person. I saw parts of him he couldn’t keep hidden. I saw how disappointment revealed itself on his face and then crept into his body and effected his game. I saw him battle that. I saw how he responded to incompetent teammates and punishing heat, I saw victories and uncertainties, and eventually I felt like I actually knew him, as if he had grown up just two doors over.
In spite of that, I fell out of the habit of watching his games, and then, about a month ago I happened upon one by chance late one night. He was pitching against the Boston Red Sox, which is like saying he was pitching against a nightmare as their batters are so overwhelming and intimidating. It was maybe the 6th inning, and Manaea looked good. Really good. In fact, he had not given up a single hit.
And from this point forward, as he pursued a no-hitter, the tension just ratcheted up. The camera was trained on him so tightly you could see beads of sweat forming and then rolling down his face. Everything became quiet and important, and each step closer to the no-hitter was a miracle in itself, and these miracles kept piling up until finally the game was over and the inconceivable had happened, not a single player had been able to get a hit off of Manaea.
His teammates, child-like and abundant, jumped all over him. Manaea, as happy as he was amazed, had a rollercoaster grin on his face. He was in paradise, everything bright and spinning and timeless. He had become the perfect version of himself. And for those of us watching, it was as if something beautiful had been restored, and without even knowing it I had been pulled from the sofa, and alone and in the dark, I stood applauding something I had grown to care about becoming what it was always meant to be.
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His pitches were comets from distant and never imagined galaxies. They were rockets, they were bombs, they were terrifying, curving flourishes that made you think you were watching the astonishing dazzle of an alien technology. It was a new kind of physics, one that allowed him to perform stunning feats that lifted us from our lousy, mortal shells,.
He was a blazing fire, a goddamned Demi-God.
Fernandez died in a boating accident on Sunday at the age of 24.
( This is a photograph of Dee Gordon, Jose Fernandez’s teammate. Gordon is known for his speed, not his power, and he is so thin and little that he truly looks like a child out there amongst the gigantic professional athletes. On the first game back after his friend’s death, in his first at bat, he hit a home run, and as he circled the bases he wept like a boy. As he said later in an interview, “I ain’t never hit a ball that far, even in batting practice. I told the boys, ‘If you all don’t believe in God, you better start.’ For that to happen today, we had some help.”)
Three times, Jose attempted to defect from Cuba to the US unsuccessfully, and after each failed attempt he was put in prison where, still a boy, he shared space with hard and dangerous men. In 2007, at the age of 15, he made the crossing successfully, but not before somebody on his boat was washed overboard. Fernandez, operating on the pure instinct of a boy that age, when right and wrong seem clear, and your body, your entire life, is still radiant and unlimited, dove into the night waters to save the person. He had no idea who had been swept into the ocean, and with each stroke he took, an eight-foot wave grabbed him, lifting him up into the shifting darkness above, before splashing down and submerging him again. The person, somewhere before him, bobbing in and out of sight, was his mother. He got to her, told her to hold tight to his left shoulder, asked her not to push down, and slowly swam her back to the boat.
Imagine that.
Imagine doing something so great with your life.
His baseball career was short and beautiful and joyous. It was something to behold, each start an event I got excited for, anticipating it the same way some other people might anticipate a new Game of Thrones episode or a Bruce Springsteen concert.
He was, in a word, awesome, and his death was a tragedy for the communities he lived amongst, and even beyond, even to a 50 year-old white guy living in Toronto who found himself trying to explain to his wife why he’s crying about the death of some pitcher on his fantasy baseball team.
The boat Fernandez was on the night of his death was traveling around 55-60 mph. He was with two of his friends, both around his age, and it was late. It would have been dark, black even– nothing but the feel of water beneath and sky above. Everything beautiful, the wind and spray and stars in his face, infinity spreading out in all directions…And Jose Fernandez, soon to be a father, moving into the future with such velocity, confidence and hard earned momentum… And then the boat hit a rock jetty and all three of the men died on impact.
Just like that.
They would not have known what had happened.
Our lives are so brief.
We’re all speeding through the dark, the beautiful and the damned, alike, each one of us luckier and more vulnerable than we could ever imagine.
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The nurses found him elbow deep in the garbage can, sifting through the spent trash as if it were the soil of his native PEI. He was harvesting anything that felt like a potato to his hands, and then dropping whatever it was on the floor by his hospital bed for later use.
Whether it was a sleeping dream he was having or a waking one no longer mattered. Lost on the rolling seas of dementia, Marcel had passed into the timeless overlap of memory where reality is nothing more than an unbidden chemical spark from deep within the mystery of his receding brain.
Marcel was harmless and never given to rage, and the nurses seemed to love him, treating him more like a pet than a patient. You could see the gentleness within him, the shapes of the men he used to be who now pushed against the diseased exterior: the fair trader, the husband, the guy who was always the first to dive in off the dock, the grandfather who did corny magic tricks and loved fishing.
Now in his mid-nineties, he wandered the corridors half-dressed. Like a poltergeist given form, he drifted in and out of the rooms on the 14th floor as if living all the lives contained therein, with each visit subtly rearranging the small articles he came upon, always setting this new house in order. The expression on his face that must have once been so clear was now lost and uncertain. He seemed blinded, a subterranean creature guided through these alien and unnaturally smooth corridors not by sight but by scent, called to this strange transit by a timeless ocean that only he could discern.
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Adega
128 Palomino Drive
San Francisco
415. 866. 2014 (Reservations recommended)
The fish’s head, with eyes as gleamy as Brigitte Bardot staring up at you from the beach, the waves washing against her legs like the breath of angels that always knew your name and your love and your god, and the hot yes and now of it,
had been set on the bottom of the bowl so that it looked up at you as if asking you the question you always knew that one day you were to be asked, and beside it the chef had placed another piece of trout, this one rolled with herbs and sea salt and smoked just to the point of ruby-hued doneness, like a sunset fallingfallingfalling and then rising, now within. It was one of the most exquisite things I ate last year, and I would return to Adega in an explosive, radiant, madly speeding BOOM. Highly recommended.
New Town Coffee House
98 Madison Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
(Phone number not available)
Careening into the New Town Coffee House the first thing that struck me was how the sunlight exploded and ran about the place like a mad, dizzy child hungry for the face of God. Hungry? Yes, all my life hungry, hungry for it all and more, hungry for her hair curling around her chin hungry for the broken promises and the industrial man hungry for all the images through all time spinning like daisies, hungry for a grilled cheese sandwich? Yes, Please! I ordered one straight away, my need for it an electrical current ripping through my body like sex, but I had to wait, I had to wait, I had to travel back in time, to the cow before the cheese, to the wheat before the bread and it was too long it was too damn long and so I spun out of there flashing flashing flashing.
